Sullivan, Robert: Rats

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Author Robert Sullivan spent many nights over the course of a year observing the nocturnal goings-on--rat-watching, in other words--in an L-shaped alley (actually the intersection of two alleys, Ryders Alley and Edens Alley) in Manhattan, just blocks away from Wall Street and City Hall and the site of the World Trade Center. (Sullivan had been trying to trap a rat in his alley in the early morning of September 11th, 2001.) The alley he selected is bounded by a Chinese restaurant on one side and an Irish pub on the other, so that its greasy-slick cobblestones are awash nightly in edible garbage of both ethnic varieties, palatable to aficionados of either type. The alley is, in short, the perfect place to raise children.

Rats, as it happens, have a lot of children to raise. Among the skin-crawlingly fascinating bits of information Sullivan provides in his highly readable paean to the Rattus norvegicus, or brown rat, is that both male and female rats can have sex twenty times a day.

"If they are not eating, then rats are usually having sex. Most likely, if you are in New York while you are reading this sentence or even in any other major city in America, then you are in proximity to two or more rats having sex."

Nor is their copulation unproductive:

"One rat's nest can turn into a rat colony of fifty rats in six months. one pair of rats has the potential of 15,000 descendants in a year."

Sullivan's observations on rats in general and on the rats in his alley in particular are interspersed with rat-related asides. He includes in his book, for example, chapters on New York's rat-motivated rent strikes in the 1960s and the rat fights of the 19th century, in which single dogs--and more rarely men--were pitted against scores of rats at a time for the amusement of a human audience. Some of Sullivan's tangents are more interesting than others, and readers will differ in their preferences. (The anecdotes of rat-hardened exterminators or urine baths as precaution against the Black Death? There is something here for every taste.) And Sullivan sometimes gets carried away with his poeticizing of the rat's experience and relationship to man. (I mean, they're just rats.) The book as a whole, however, is a delightful look at a rarely-considered world that is, often quite literally, right beneath our feet.

Comments

[Clare D]

1.

Excellent review! This looks like exactly what I've been looking for.

[Debra Hamel]

2.

Thanks, Clare! Funny to think that what you've been looking for (all your life, I assume) is a book about rats.